E. M. Forster’s ‘A Room With a View’ Tonight on PBS — Is It a Coincidence That This Follows the Jane Austen Cycle?

A new production of E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View airs tonight on Masterpiece Theater, which ended its Jane Austen cycle last week. A coincidence? Or is PBS trying to strike a blow for moral realism? The late V. S. Pritchett noted the similarity between the novelists in “Mr. Forster’s Birthday” in his Complete Collected Essays (Random House, 1991): “No one is let off in Forster’s novels; like Jane Austen, he is a moral realist.” Watch the preview of tonight’s A Room With A View, with Elaine Cassidy as Lucy Honeychurch at www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.